Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology by Silvia Casini (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology by Silvia Casini
• Annie Y. Patrick (bio)

Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology By Silvia Casini. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Pp. 312.

In 1974, a biologist in the biomedical physics laboratory at the University of Aberdeen broke the neck of a mouse to test a newly developed magnetic system. As the system produced data, a physicist began to interpret the data using paints and crayons, creating a colorful coded image of the various tissues of the mouse. This moment would become the predecessor of what is known as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)—the technology used in hospitals and healthcare settings across the globe to see into the human body.

In Giving Bodies Back to Data, Silvia Casini provides an enlightening study of how science and the arts engage with data visualization through her [End Page 705] study of MRI technology. She traces the development of MRI technology through the intersecting interests of researchers, clinicians, and physicists at the University of Aberdeen to explore how data visualization is a process that creates a unique space to consider both what is seen and what remains hidden. Perhaps more interesting, Casini continues this study of data visualization as she draws connections between the history of MRI technology and the work of artists and collaborators who transformed this data and clinical knowledge into artistic expressions that truly gave data back to the body.

Casini's book is written for scholars and practitioners interested in art-science collaborations. With this audience in mind, she has divided her book into two sections of three chapters each. In the first section, she draws on various approaches, such as STS knowledge, medical anthropology, and historical epistemology, to examine archival and ethnographic data to study the early development of magnetic imaging technology. For example, Casini uses Mark I, a full-body MRI scanner prototype, as a boundary object that moves between the researchers' benchwork, the clinicians' needs, and underlying artistic application to make the data meaningful. In doing so, she guides the reader through the interests and objects of the many actors contributing to MRI development and its future. Casini then brings this study into the present through her interviews and observations of fast field-cycling MRI research. In this contemporary research setting, she demonstrates how data visualization remains a complicated art-science space as researchers attempt to build a more robust MRI system. This dual examination of the Aberdeen lab nicely echoes the laboratory ethnography of scholars such as Knorr, Traweek, and Latour. Additionally, it provides a well-supported illustration of how MRI technology and data visualization are embedded within the humanities.

An intermezzo is provided between these two sections as the author transitions from the science of data visualization to the art of data visualization. Aptly titled "Lives in the Grid," this reading presents the Cartesian grid as a cornerstone of science, the data, and even our bodies. After this brief interlude, chapter 5 begins the book's journey into more recent developments, in which artists create sculptures and prints. For example, Casini presents artists who use MRI technology to create portraits, sculptures, and multimixed renderings that challenge the science and clinical meanings of MRI technology and remind us of the humans embedded in the images. She shows how artists challenge the reductionism of imaging technology, highlights the relational character of data and, perhaps more importantly, connects the data back to people and their lives.

In this well-researched work, Casini unpacks the current discussions regarding imaging technology to explore the intersection of output aesthetics, artistic expression, and scientific practice. Additionally, she offers her study as a framework for others interested in similar questions and practices regarding the intersection of science and art. Though Casini brings in the voices of the researchers and the artists, the voices of the scanned bodies [End Page 706] are missing. The perspective of the bodies eventually seen as images and sculptures would have significantly contributed to the bodies that exist as an undercurrent of this book.

Overall, this is an engaging and enlightening read connecting science...